by Scott Saul
By the time Richard started taping the final episode of his show on October 11, both he and the network were looking forward to the end of their relationship. The Richard Pryor Show had shed viewers until it was in the basement of the Nielsen ratings; Richard was as volatile as a tropical weather system, flashing between indifference and defiance, resignation and anger. His last show had both more filler and more minutes of caustic performance that had to be left on the cutting-room floor. As part of his kiss-off to NBC, he expanded one of his Mudbone monologues into a sixty-five minute, expletive-soaked “sustained sleight of comic imagination,” in the words of the New York Times. Exactly twenty-two words of it were suitable for broadcast.
Richard’s mixed feelings were in full evidence at the comic roast held on his behalf and aired, in severely edited form, on the last episode. At the event Marsha Warfield teased Richard about his compulsive womanizing: “Richard Pryor is a real humanitarian. He’s raised a lot of money for young students. In fact, he’s paid half the girls at the local high school to keep their mouths shut.” Robin Williams offered, under the cover of a jibe, some wisdom about the nature of Richard’s talent: “This man’s a genius. Who else can take all the forms of comedy—slapstick, satire, mime, and stand-up—and turn it into something that would offend everyone? . . . All he wants is a loose director, a tight script, and a warm place to rehearse.” And Paul Mooney took the occasion to deliver a heartfelt tribute: “Richard Pryor is a lot like a child. . . . He’s innocent in a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways he’s not so innocent, and he’s a beautiful human being and I love him dearly. I’m really glad we did this, and I really mean that.” He hugged Richard, who rose to a standing ovation from the cast.
Richard took the podium and cut the mood with an improvised, and never-aired, series of insults that started light and became increasingly savage. “Thank you, I’m thrilled. It’s not often that amateur people get a chance to be on television,” he began. A few minutes later he was mocking Tim Reid’s manhood (“We wanted to give him a job because he had the shortest thing of any black man in America, and we didn’t want white people to know”); cutting down Marsha Warfield as “a big black gorilla” whom the show had adopted from the zoo (“We fixed her hair, and she’s been acting the fool ever since”); skewering a tubby cast member without mercy (“He has a wedding band on him, but Mrs. Hippo isn’t here tonight”); and eviscerating his friend David Banks as the ultimate pimp (“I first met him in church—he tried to get an angel to sit on my face”). It was an exercise in over-the-top cruelty, virtuosic in its spontaneity but hitting uncomfortably close to the bone. Then Richard reversed himself and turned sentimental: “I have a special place in my heart for everyone here. I really love them because they are brilliant people and they have made the show possible.” Just as he had thanked the whole crew of Which Way Is Up? when it wrapped, so he singled out his show’s set and lighting designers along with the writers and actors. The show had wrecked him—afflicted him with a set of responsibilities he couldn’t manage—but it had also put him at the center of a singular troupe of young artists, who had thrilled at the risks he took for his art and had buoyed him up.
The last two sketches of the final episode stand as a fitting emblem of all that Richard accomplished on his show and all that he suffered for it. In the haunting “Gun Shop,” he played a man who, as he walks through the shop and peruses the merchandise, hears each gun talking to him. A rifle drawls, “I don’t like you, boy. Come on down to my part of the country—I’ll show you law and order.” A pearl-handled pistol murmurs, “Mrs. Mercer said I used to make her feel sexy. We finally got a mugger. The last thing he saw was the fire that came out of my eyes.” Richard continues to drift and be assailed by voices. A Saturday-night special, afflicted with status anxiety, jabbers, “You don’t think I have class—I got class! I killed more people than anybody in this room”; a Luger pistol brags of itself as “a weapon of ethnic purity.” Each gun, it seems, is trapped in its own pathology, hungering to visit its particular brand of destruction on the world. The sketch ends with Richard leaving the store, rattled and empty-handed; a gun revolves on a carousel until it’s pointed straight at the viewer.
Haunted by voices: Richard Pryor in “Gun Shop.” (Courtesy of the author)
With “Gun Shop,” Richard was taking aim at himself. The actor spooked at the gun shop was, after all, the same person who had pistol-whipped an early manager, shot up his first gold record over frustrations with his record label, and acquired an arsenal that encompassed a Walther .380 automatic, a Colt .357 Magnum, an antique flintlock, and a shotgun. It takes nothing away from the power of the sketch to note that, at a New Year’s Eve party just ten weeks after “Gun Shop” aired, Richard seized a gun and, in a fury, unloaded it into a Mercedes that had previously contained his wife and friends. Demons are not so easily cast out that they can be ventilated and exorcised in a six-minute sketch. But what is remarkable is that Richard was able to see those demons with such piercing clarity and get others to share his vision of himself. In his art, he achieved the sort of ironic distance that was impossible to maintain in the churning slipstream of his life.
“A Rebuttal,” the final sketch of The Richard Pryor Show, was a fitting send-off—an encapsulation of Richard’s experience on the TV show as a whole. A white-whiskered Richard came on the news in the person of Santa Claus to offer an “editorial,” which in his case was a rant about the difficulties of pleasing the multitudes. A flask of whiskey sat conveniently at Santa’s elbow; toy cars and airplanes were scattered everywhere in front of him. He talked, with faux cheeriness, of being overworked to a breaking point:
Advertisers and businessmen are beginning to celebrate the holiday season a little earlier every year—’long about July 12, I would say—and it’s a pain for Santa. Not that I mind it, because I love each and every one of you dearly, but it puts a lot of pressure on lovable Santa.
[Takes a swig from the flask.]
You know, boys and girls, I have to work a little harder every year. Not that I mind, ’cause I love each and every one of you. Ho ho ho! But I work my f—
[CENSORED flashes on the screen with a long beep.]
Huh? Did you ever think about how hard I have to work? Or do you give a [CENSORED] I work my Rudolph off?
Confessing that he had gone “dingy,” Santa groused about having, every day, to answer four million letters (many composed by children with extremely poor handwriting!); explained that Rudolph’s nose was red because, like Santa, he was a sniffer; talked leeringly of the “ho” in “ho ho ho”; and then blacked out at the news desk. The whiskey—or was it the burden of having to try to please everyone in the world on an impossible schedule?—had felled him. He couldn’t hold the stage.
In early November, Which Way Is Up?—the movie Richard had called “the most special thing I’ve ever done”—opened to the most stinging mainstream reviews of his career. Producer Steven Krantz had fretted, before its release, that the film might antagonize critics with its ripe dialogue, ribald plot, and clear put-down of big business. What he hadn’t anticipated was that among a certain set of critics—white, older—it would be labeled racist and intolerable. The Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin, who had earlier applauded Richard in Wattstax and Greased Lightning, wrote, “If ‘Which Way Is Up’ isn’t racially offensive, what in God’s name is? It takes the oldest stereotype of all—of blacks as oversexed or sexually obsessive children, and I would expect the NAACP to be in the streets with placards.” Variety’s Arthur Murphy blew a gasket: “Pryor’s career seems now at a crossroads, where his increasingly annoying brand of reverse racism must vanish. . . . [T]his film brings into focus the fact that a lot of his material exploits in a shallow fashion the very character stereotypes that, literally, millions of people have, not without difficulty in many cases, managed to overcome.” About the character of Richard’s reverend, Murphy huffed: “a Ku Klux Klan propaganda film couldn’t do it better.”
And yet—the NAACP did not protest; the Ku Klux Klan did not claim Which Way as its own; and though Universal partly dumped the movie in second-string theaters in black neighborhoods, Which Way succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of its creative team. Five months after its opening, Krantz could tout it as the most commercially successful black film in history, with twenty-three million dollars in domestic and foreign rentals. And in some circles—left-leaning or black—it was seen as the exact opposite of racist. The Village Voice hailed the film as director Michael Schultz’s “first major” black film, one which invited the black audience to identify with its spirit of “chastened survival” rather than the “defeatism” of Wertmüller’s Seduction of Mimi. The black-themed magazine Cause celebrated Which Way for moving beyond the “false and empty macho images” of blaxploitation; it was an “upbeat, positive film of Black identification.” As with his TV show and performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Richard had cleaved audiences apart, delighting some in the act of antagonizing others.
Critics like Champlin and Murphy saw only the outer mask of the movie. They asked if the film offered, in the characters Richard played, role models for black life, and they just as quickly determined that it didn’t: Leroy Jones was a weak-willed opportunist; his father, Rufus, a self-satisfied satyr; the Reverend Lenox Thomas a hypocrite of the highest order. These critics missed that, far from the Hollywood mainstream, there had long been a comic tradition in which black performers played with the most shameful of stereotypes—the dissolute preacher, the cheating gambler, the hot-tempered “coon”—and in a complex move, both entertained the stereotypes and shuffled them off. Richard located himself in this tradition of self-conscious caricature: after Which Way’s release, he expressed interest in making a biopic about the vaudevillian Bert Williams, who was the tradition’s most gifted turn-of-the-century exponent, a black man turning blackface to account.
For Richard, the demand to be a “role model” was a trap that would have him forever playing safe parts like Greased Lightning’s Wendell Scott. He was an artist, not a spokesman, and as an artist, he was drawn to the poetry of failure. His major theme was self-sabotage, and it was difficult for him to play a self-saboteur without coming in the vicinity of stereotypes about black foolishness. In a perceptive review of Which Way, the New York Times’ Vincent Canby noted the difficulty and delicacy of Richard’s balancing act. Canby judged Richard “one of the few actors . . . who manages to be funny—sometimes outrageously so—while giving every impression of being furious with his audience and removed from his material. This distance from his characters, however, allows him to play black stereotypes in a way that sends up the stereotypes while getting every last laugh from them.” This balancing act had its dangers: Bert Williams described himself as “whittling on dynamite.” Richard was a fellow whittler. His caricatures, if not handled with the proper finesse, always threatened to blow up in his face.
A great number of contemporary black-themed comedies might claim Which Way Is Up? as their Hollywood ancestor. The Barbershop movies, Friday and its sequels, the spoofs produced by the Wayans brothers, the Madea films of Tyler Perry—all these have rooted themselves in the sort of gutbucket humor that takes everyday buffoonery and magnifies its dimensions to the point of cartoonishness. They’ve also courted critical disapproval and controversy as a result—been derided, like Which Way Is Up?, as low-brow, or been faulted for refusing to offer positive images of the black community.
Yet the comparison also reveals the uniqueness of Which Way Is Up?. Unlike these other movies, Which Way was both a sex comedy and a film grounded in the spirit of la causa. The farmworkers’ struggle was the backdrop against which Richard’s Leroy Jones proved himself a fool, so trapped within his macho psychodrama that he couldn’t see how he’d become a pawn in the larger power play between a corporation and its workers. In its final scene, Leroy had to watch his soul mate, Vanetta, drive off with his friend Chuy, a pro-union firebrand who has none of Leroy’s wishy-washiness. Leroy’s only heroic gesture is his very last: he tells his corporate patron to “shoot me in the ass ’cause that’s the only part of me you’re ever gonna see” and walks down the open road, jaunty for once, no longer pulled by someone else’s string. Leroy may not have the faintest idea where he is going, but at least he feels himself moving forward. The credits roll over his image as it recedes into the horizon.
With his TV series in the can, Richard had hopes of pulling himself away from the bad habits that had gotten him through its production. He anticipated that when he and Deboragh traveled to Maui for a true honeymoon, his soul might find some rest. Instead, the bad habits clung to him. On the first night, he found himself reeling—drunk and covered with his own vomit in the shower while his new wife complained about the shabbiness of their accommodations. There were bugs, apparently, and their bungalow had no room service. “Are we going to eat cornflakes for a week?” she demanded. That night set the tone for the week that followed. Richard’s mind wandered from his honeymoon and his bride: he kept telephoning LA to speak with Jennifer Lee, who came to feel that Richard’s marriage was, oddly, “bringing us even closer together.”
Back in New York City for another shoot on The Wiz, Richard journeyed farther down the road of excess. “I caroused with sleazy, doped-up nogoodniks all night,” he recalled. “I was as lit as the white suit I wore playing the Wiz himself. I answered my wake-up calls by saying, ‘Oh, shit, I made it again.’”
On November 9, with Deboragh at his side, Richard flew to Peoria for a belated celebration of his grandmother Marie’s seventy-eighth birthday. The next afternoon, he went fishing with Deboragh, Marie, and Uncle Dickie. The day was beautiful, the weather bracing and fresh, but Richard was unable to relax into the peaceful rhythm of casting lines. Back in his hometown, he itched to satisfy the cravings that his early years had planted in him. He and Dickie skipped out on the fishing trip to have some private time with two women who, according to Deboragh, were the “two most unattractive white women ever—dogs.” In his memoir, Richard himself called his partner an “ugly whore.” It was as if he were a prisoner of his drift, spiraling down into the black hole of his addictions and testing his new wife to see how much she would mutely bear witness to his vanishing act. Deboragh refused to look on passively; she packed her bags for LA.
In the middle of sex with the prostitute, Richard felt his heart race and hammer. He gasped for air and had trouble finding it; he felt sick. He was reprising the family theme—death by sex—that his father had established a decade earlier. Still, he paid little attention at first to the discomfort; a racing heart was nothing new to him. Then the pain arrived—a starburst of pain in his chest—and he dropped the pretense that this was his body’s business as usual. Somehow he brought himself to his grandmother and cried, “Mama! Mama! Help me, Mama!”
When everyone in his family rallied to rush him to the hospital, Richard saw a dark subtext. “They were probably closer to death than I was,” he observed. “They saw their money supply gasping for air, moaning, and writhing in pain. They probably wondered if this wasn’t some sick joke. Me coming home to die in front of them. They weren’t going to have none of that shit. Not about to lose my fame and money.” Richard was thirty-six years old, the most sensational rising star in black Hollywood, and at risk of frittering himself to death.
On November 10, the day after Richard was admitted to the emergency room of Methodist Medical Center, a radio station in Los Angeles reported that he had died. The news was false: Richard was at that moment recovering, in the hospital’s coronary care unit, after a restless night. Five hundred phone calls poured into the hospital from various friends and well-wishers, among them Aretha Franklin, Olivia Newton-John, and Sammy Davis Jr. According to the Peoria Journal Star, every caller seemed to believe that they had a special relationship with Richard—that he would return their calls if only the hospital took the care to pass along their number. But Richard was in no mood to plug back into the w
orld. After being discharged from the hospital, he told a reporter, “I was on a treadmill, and you often just get on it and don’t look back for a while.” He was ready to dial back on his commitments. Talking to himself as much as the reporter, he said, “Success is no good if you don’t have your health.”
Thirteen months later, Richard took the stage of Long Beach’s Terrace Theater and performed his experience of his heart attack. In the interim, he had publicly destroyed his marriage to Deboragh—had shot it full of holes on New Year’s Eve, just a little while after telling an Ebony reporter, “We’re going to be very happy together a long time, because it’s the first time I’ve admitted I don’t know anything.” Without skipping a beat, he had taken up with Jennifer Lee, who matched him in her appetite for the drama of life: the two were swept up in the blizzard of Richard’s cocaine use, and for years ran themselves ragged with the intense form their love took. (Lee’s memoir, Tarnished Angel, is at once a love story and a wiredrawn account of the insanities unleashed by cocaine—how, under its influence, petty jealousies get magnified into crazed vendettas.)